Hello! I am a Licensed Professional Counselor. I enjoy getting to know my patients and helping them make progress. Its exciting to see people make breakthroughs and start to feel better. I hope to get to know you and help you gain more understanding of yourself. I will pass on useful knowledge to help you find relief and get closer to your goals. I have been working as a counselor for 9 years. I learned a lot while working in a hospital and a clinic during the early part of my career. Now I do online therapy with patients from all over Texas. I have experience working with males and females of all ages & with many different needs and diagnoses. I am used to working with people who have problems related to depression, all types of anxiety, anger, stress, trauma and relationship issues.
What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?
In our first appointment we will discuss what challenges you are facing and what has made you decide to come to therapy. We will talk about your history. We will also talk about your goals. This will help us build better understanding and give us direction for future appointments.
Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.
I think my best strength is helping people feel safe enough to express themselves openly and honestly. I have several years of experience. I have studied a lot and taken a lot of extra trainings to build a thorough understanding of mental health and therapy.
About Manuel Olvera
Identifies as
Specializes in
Licensed in
Accepts
Appointments
VirtualMy treatment methods
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
CBT can help you gain more self-awareness and relief from things like depression, habits, anger, and anxiety. CBT is all about understanding how your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are connected to each other. As you learn more about how your thinking patterns and your behavior patterns are connected to the way you feel, you can start to make changes and improve your life.
Brainspotting
Brainspotting is a therapy technique that is more physical rather than verbal. During brainspotting, I would move a pointer, and you would follow the pointer with your eyes while trying to stay focused on how you feel in the present moment. While making eye movements, we are looking for eye positions that cause you to have reflexes. These reflexes are important because they can affect the way you feel. Some reflexes might cause you to feel more intense sensations, such as restless tension, nervousness, or not being able to sit still. Other reflexes can cause you to feel more relaxed or even sleepy. These reflexes are caused by positions of your eyes stimulating the parts of the brain that control our emotions and how our bodies respond to stress. Focusing on these reflexes allows your brain and body to practice calming down and dealing with stress, which is why brainspotting is especially useful for people who frequently go into fight or flight mode with severe issues like trauma, PTSD, and panic disorder. Brainspotting can also help people with other emotional issues such as addiction or depression. We can do brainspotting online if you have a computer or tablet and a camera. Bringing the screen a little closer to your face can help the process and makes it more like we are in the room together, think of it like wearing virtual reality goggles. Brainspotting is more gentle than some other forms of therapy because we can go through the process without having to talk about specific traumatic events. We just focus on your emotions and the way your body responds to the process, and you can talk just as much as you want to.
Gottman method
Dr. John Gottman is a psychologist who has been studying couples since the 1970's. He brings couples into his laboratory and studies the way they interact together and how their bodies responded to stress and arguments. Some couples come back to the laboratory year after year. John and his colleagues studied thousands of couples over the years and were able to identify traits and behaviors that couples had in common. They noticed that couples who were happy and stayed together had certain ways of communicating and responding to eachother, whereas couples who ended up being unhappy together or getting divorced also had different habits. He and his wife Julie, who is also a psychologist, put all this information together to help therapists teach clients how to work on painful issues, improve communication, and strengthen their connections.